Reluctant Genius (28 page)

Elisha Gray gave his evidence in New York in April. Alec was not impressed. “First day of Elisha Gray’s Cross-Examination just concluded,” he wrote his father on April
4.
“Everything coming out in our favour!” Three days later, the Bell team triumphantly produced the piece de résistance of their case: a letter that Gray had written to Alec back in March 1877 and that had turned up in the wastepaper basket at Bell’s old Boston lodgings in Exeter Place. In the letter, Gray congratulated Bell on his work, and wrote, “I do not, however, claim even the credit of inventing it, as I do not believe in a mere description of an idea that has never been
reduced
to
practice
… should be dignified with the name invention.” The Western Union lawyers winced as the letter was read in court. Gray confirmed the authenticity of the letter, then apologized to his counsel: “I’ll swear to it, and you can swear at it!”

Alec sympathized with a man whom he felt was fundamentally decent, if misguided. “Poor Mr. Gray. I feel sorry for him,” he told Mabel. “I feel sure he would never of his own accord have allowed himself to be placed in the painful position in which he is now.” But the admission in Gray’s letter went to the heart of the defense argument—an argument that the Western Union lawyers were beginning to realize was distinctly wobbly. The issue was whether Alexander Graham Bell’s patents and legal proofs were superior to those of the Western Union’s stable of inventors: Elisha Gray, Thomas Edison, and Amos Dolbear. None of the Western Union witnesses had stood up well under cross-examination; their indignation often made their stories sound confused and contradictory. When Alec had filed his patent application in February 1876, Gray was still only playing around with possibilities and had filed a caveat announcing his intentions rather than a patent application describing an invention. Thomas Edison did not design his transmitter until after he had seen Alec’s at the Philadelphia Exhibition. Amos Dolbear’s claim that he had identified the undulatory current as the means to achieve transmission of speech before Alec did was made irrelevant by the fact that he had not patented an invention before Alec was granted Patent No. 174,465.

In contrast, Alec’s majestic bearing, steady gaze, and straightforward manner made him a formidable witness. With his almost photographic memory, educated British accent, and clear articulation, he radiated an unrivaled authority as he methodically laid out the sequence of events leading up to his patent submission. His testimony, taken in July 1879, filled nearly a hundred pages of the six-hundred-page printed record, and looked unbeatable.

Even before the hearings wound up in September, the Western Union lawyers had decided that the risks of pursuing the case were too great. They informed their client that the Bell patents were watertight, and they opened negotiations with Chauncey Smith to settle the case. Their first suggestion was that each side should have an equal share in the combined patents of both. Smith rejected the suggestion out of hand. The final out-of-court deal, signed on November 10,1879, was an expensive blow to the mighty company: Western Union transferred at cost all telephones, lines, switchboards, patent rights in telephony, and any pending claims to the Bell Telephone Company. In return, the Bell Company agreed to stay out of telegraphy and to pay Western Union 20 percent of all telephone receipts until protection guaranteed by Patent No. 174,465 ran out. What a victory for Bell! The shareholders in the Bell Telephone Company held title to a monopoly on a wildly popular invention, and there were at least fourteen more years of patent protection ahead. They also now had access to a network of established agencies and customers.

“I felt,” Thomas Watson recorded later, “as if a crushing weight had rolled off of me.” If Alec had been in Boston instead of Washington when the deal was reached, Watson would have insisted on his former boss joining him in an exuberant, whooping, stamping Mohawk war dance—the kind that had once infuriated their landlady. Instead, Watson celebrated by catching the train to Marblehead and walking along the beach, declaiming to the skies all the poetry he could remember. “It was an undignified thing for the Chief Engineer of the Telephone Company to do,” he later wrote. “But I certainly felt better for it next day.”

The settlement of the Western Union suit was far from the end of the litigation battles. The telephone business was now so profitable that Alec Bell had to deal with all manner of people who wanted a share of the action. During the nineteenth century, groundbreaking inventions were repeatedly litigated: the 1834 patent on Cyrus McCormick’s harvester was challenged nine times; the 1840 patent on Samuel Morse’s telegraph, fifteen times. These numbers pale into insignificance, however, compared to the more than six hundred separate cases involving the telephone. Most owed their origin to Gardiner Hubbard’s vigilance, because they were brought by the Bell Company against infringements of Alec’s patents. The long list of unsuccessful litigants included serious inventors, such as Gray and Dolbear, who had convinced themselves, despite the evidence and the court judgments, that they had had the idea of a telephone first. Then there were the rascals, such as Daniel Drawbaugh, a Pennsylvanian machinist who claimed he had invented a telephone before Bell, although he told the court, “I don’t remember how I came to it.” He had not applied for patents, he explained, because he could not afford to pay the fees or build the models.

The clamor of claimants was accompanied by a parade of professors as witnesses, a gallery of drawings proving prior invention, and a medley of exhibits, tin dippers, teacups, and mustard tins with which inventors claimed to have antedated Alec’s discovery. In most of the cases, the Bell Company’s opponents gave up the fight before they got to the higher courts. Twelve of the suits reached decisions in the circuit courts, and five went as far as the Supreme Court in Washington. “Out of the dispute over Bell’s claims,” wrote Judge Brower in an 1892 decision, “has come the most important, the most protracted litigation that has arisen under the patent system in this country.”

Every single case that went to court was decided in Alec’s favor. Alec was usually spared the necessity of appearing as a witness because his lengthy and careful 1879 testimony was simply inserted into the court record on subsequent occasions. On his lawyers’ advice, he told a later correspondent, he would “writhe in silence under the unscrupulous attacks which were made upon me.”

There were, however, two cases that required his appearance in court.

The first was a suit alleging patent infringement that the Bell Company brought against the People’s Telephone Company. A group of unscrupulous New York and Cincinnati businessmen had created this company by paying $20,000 to Daniel Drawbaugh for his claim to have invented the telephone, and then selling first stock in the company and then pirate telephones. Over the course of four weeks in March and April 1883, Alec was cross-examined on the deposition he had given in the original Western Union case. His own lawyers, from the Washington firm Mauro, Cameron, Lewis and Kerkam, marveled at Alexander Graham Bell’s “capacity for long-sustained mental effort” when giving a deposition. It began in mid-morning, and by two that afternoon the lawyers mustered the courage to ask Alec if he cared to pause for lunch. “I don’t lunch,” said Bell, and proceeded with his deposition to the end of the day. The People’s Telephone Company claim was finally dismissed in 1891, when the Bell patents had almost expired—by which time Mauro, Cameron, Lewis and Kerkam had earned an estimated $50,000 in fees from their client. Drawbaugh himself was reprimanded by the court for blatant falsehoods, but, undeterred, he popped up a few years later to claim he had invented the radio before Marconi.

The second case that required Alec to appear in court was a much murkier, more complicated one, involving political shenanigans. Two shady Tennessee businessmen had banked on the assumption that as long as a legal challenge to the Bell patents was working its way through the U.S. courts, any alleged infringers might be able to continue to pursue their business. The gamble, for Dr. James W. Rogers and Casey Young, was to keep spinning out the legal process until the Bell patents had expired. The two men set up the Pan-Electric Telephone Company, persuaded various local southern heroes, including General Joseph E. Johnston and Senator Augustus Garland, former governor of Arkansas, to become directors, and began to sell stock. The celebrity names on the letterhead quickly attracted investors. The Pan-Electric Telephone Company appeared well launched when Garland was appointed attorney general in 1884 by newly elected president Grover Cleveland. The company’s Tennessee backers promptly asked the attorney general to sue for the annulment of Bell’s patents, on the grounds that they were obtained by fraud and that Bell was not the original inventor.

Even Mr. Garland realized that he was a little too close for comfort to Pan-Electric, so he left his deputy to respond to the request while he was absent from the capital. His deputy, the solicitor general (a Virginian), and the secretary of the interior (a Mississippian) agreed that the United States government should sue the American Bell Telephone Company. The main argument was that there had been fraud in the U.S. Patent Office when Alec’s original application for the telephone patent had arrived in the office on February 14, 1876, and this allegation must be properly investigated. The case rested on the claim that Alec had not mentioned the 1861 Philipp Reis telephone to the Patent Office examiner, Zenas F. Wilber, and that Wilber had showed the Elisha Gray caveat to Alec’s lawyers so they could insert the substance of it in the Bell application. The suit was launched in January 1887, at government expense. Meanwhile, Pan-Electric directors continued to line their pockets, and headlines alleging that the Bell telephone patents had been obtained under false pretenses were splashed across New York newspapers.

Lawyers for the American Bell Telephone Company moved fast: they successfully obtained injunctions for patent infringement against Pan-Electric and its subcompanies, which effectively stopped Pan-Electric from selling pirated telephones. But Alec himself was hurt by the allegations of fraud and by the slurs on his name. In 1892, he would have to spend a total of nine weeks, off and on, in court, once again reviewing his role in the history of the invention of the telephone. Eventually, owing to lack of evidence and the death of the governments chief counsel in 1896, the whole case quietly expired.

“The real excellence of your deposition and its naturalness,” one of Alec’s lawyers reassured him, “lie in the fact that in telling your own history you are telling the story of the man who invented and who knew that he had invented, the electric speaking telephone.” But the experience deeply wounded the inventor, and taught him a lesson he never forgot. From now on, he kept scrupulous records of every idea, every experiment, every piece of equipment he constructed. There are sixty volumes of “Laboratory Notes” in the Bell archive.

In May 1879, six months after returning from England, the Bells were scrambling for money. “We have not a penny to call our own,” Mabel wrote anxiously to her father. Alex was “down with a bad headache,” and they were living on “the grocer’s confidence … as there are many things we need at once we are pretty hard up.” But as the law case progressed and victory began to seem likely, Alec and Mabel Bell realized that there was a chance of real wealth ahead. Telephones would never prove as lucrative as railroads, steel, or oil wells: the Bells, along with other major shareholders of the new National Bell Telephone Company, including Gardiner Hubbard, Thomas Sanders, and Thomas Watson, would be millionaires several times over, but they did not join the Carnegies, Morgans, or Vanderbilts within the ranks of the nineteenth-century mega-rich. After the various refinancing maneuvers that the Bell Telephone Company had gone through, the Bells had ended up with 1,106 shares of the new National Bell Telephone Company’s total of 7,250 shares. In March 1879, before Alec had even given his testimony in court, Mabel’s father informed her that stock priced at $50,000 three months earlier now had a market value of $71,890. It is always difficult to calculate today’s equivalents of such sums, allowing for inflation, but assuming a twenty-fold increase in value of the dollar using the consumer price index, this meant that Mabel’s stock in the Bell Telephone Company was worth $1,318,370. After living hand to mouth since their marriage two years earlier, Alec and Mabel might now never have to worry about money again. For Mabel, who was still only twenty-one, the prospect was quite delicious.

That year, Mabel recorded in her journal a “long discussion on riches” with Alec. The conversation took place in the parlor of 1509 Rhode Island Avenue, a Washington house they had rented so they could be together during the long court case, and where Mabel could be close to her family. Alec was sitting at his desk with an untidy pile of old letters and notes in front of him. With much harrumphing and grumbling, he was trying to find material for his deposition. Mabel sat on the floor, oblivious to the dust and disarray surrounding her, unpacking trunks of books and clothes and musing on their future. Looking up at her husband so she could read his reaction, she told him that she would like “fifteen thousand a year, my fine house and carriage.” Alec’s Scottish parsimony rose to the surface. He told her that five thousand a year seemed more than adequate to him, and surely she would be able to keep a carriage on that? Or did she want him to give up his scientific work and devote himself to making money so that she could “lie in [a] carriage and dress in velvet?”

Alec’s dismissal of such dreams as frivolous and self-indulgent brought out a streak of Gardiner Hubbard in Mabel. With a wicked smile, she asked sweetly, “What is there higher than making money?” Alec brushed aside her sarcasm as he waxed lyrical on one of his favorite subjects: “Science, adding to Knowledge, bringing us nearer to God.” He put down the papers he was leafing through and, fixing his black eyes on his wife’s face, he went on, “Yes, I hold it is one of the highest of all things, the increase of knowledge making us more like God.” It was a strange way for a self-confessed atheist to frame his ambition. But Mabel just grinned as he asked dramatically, “Will you bring me down and force me to give up my scientific work?” They both knew that this would never happen. The previous month, he had bought a set of the new
Encyclopaedia Britannica
and had announced he was going to read it from start to finish. However reluctant Alec was to exploit his inventions, nothing would dampen his irrepressible urge to explore, discover, improve. “No,” Mabel replied amiably. “Only I want money too if I can get it.” Husband and wife exchanged knowing looks. “So you shall my dear,” Alec smiled, “and doubtless you will by and by.”